Appalachian Trail

Appalachian Trail

The Appalachian Trail - a 2,000+ mile hiking trail from Georgia to Maine - is an incredible hiking experience that traverses the highlights of the Appalachian Mountains. I've been hiking sections of the trail on and off for the past few years. My posts on the AT focus on the stories and experience of the trail.

Featured Posts on the Appalachian Trail

Standing Indian Loop on the Appalachian Trail: How a myth, a storm, and friendship can electrify your perspective

A long time ago, in the area where Franklin, NC now sits, local Cherokee told a story of a winged beast that swooped down from the skies and stole children. Heartbroken and desperate, the local villagers sent a warrior to the highest mountain to keep watch for the winged monster and to discover its lair. The warrior found the lair, but it was in a place in the mountains inaccessible to humans, so the Cherokee villagers prayed to the Great Spirit for assistance. The Great Spirit heard their pleas and sent thunder and lightning to destroy the winged monster. The lightning scarred the surrounding mountains but the warrior, afraid for his life, tried to abandon his post. To punish his act of cowardice the Great Spirit sent a bolt of lightning to the mountain summit, leaving a bald and turning the warrior to stone. From that day forward the mountain was called Yunwitsule-nunyi which means "where the man stood."

Today we call it Standing Indian Mountain. The bald is still there, as well as the rock scars on the sides of the nearby mountains, but the rock shaped like a man is crumbling, forgotten to all except those that know to look for it.

How long distance trails can become embedded in our psyche

I don't know when I first heard about the Appalachian Trail. It seems like I've always known about it, like it was some seed of knowledge that was embedded deep in my psyche before I was even born, but I must have learned about it at some point. Most likely I was just exposed to bits and pieces of information about the trail and so I learned about it piecemeal. Even the first time I set foot on the trail - on a day hike in Virginia with one of my best friends from college - I hadn't quite grasped the true meaning of the trail. I understood it existed and I understood you could hike it. I even understood that you could thru-hike it if you were crazy enough to love mountains and pain and you disliked showers and soft beds, but I certainly didn't grasp that there was an entire culture of people who lived and breathed the trail.

I've got to admit something to you all: as much as I love hiking and books I've actually read very few trail memoirs. Sure, I've read the basics like Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and Cheryl Strayed's Wild, but that's about it (correction: that is it!), and even then those are hiking novels written by writers rather than memoirs written by hikers. So when Beaufort Books reached out to me to see if I'd be interested in reading Jeff Alt's A Walk for Sunshine I was eager to give it a chance.

Some weekend trips just work out perfectly. Sometimes you expect tough climbs or bad weather, or that you'll have to sleep in a cold car the night before you get on the trail. And sometimes you get a bed & breakfast and a beautiful sunset on a stunning bald. My friend Sherry and I explored the Appalachian Trail from Carver's Gap to 19E over Easter weekend, and it was one beautiful adventure!

Q&A with Emily after her first time backpacking (our Max Patch adventure)

It's hiking season! I'm super excited about tackling another section of the Appalachian Trail this weekend with another friend and I'm still head over heels with the last trip with Emily. To celebrate I caught up with Emily and got her thoughts on her first backpacking trip and what she learned as a newbie.

How I introduced my friend to backpacking with incredible views and juuuuuuust a wee bit of snow

We had a few days off work on March 16 and 17 (rumor has it we got those days off because of the start of the NCAA tournament), so with the extra free time my friend Emily and I headed off to the mountains to hike a section of the Appalachian Trail.This was Emily's first backpacking trip and the pressure was on me to make sure she 1) didn't die, and 2) had a good time. (Spoiler: I delivered on #1, and hopefully on #2!)

Putting off the dream of thru-hiking for at least another year

It's early March and the thru-hikers are flocking to the Appalachian Trail, and once again - for yet another spring - I can't help but be jealous of them. People post in Facebook groups and forum threads that I follow: some with trepidation before their journey, some with elation over some discovery, and some desperate for an ounce of encouragement after confronting setbacks or difficulty or fear.

Over the holidays I somehow managed to convince my dad that I totally needed a GoPro. I carried the GoPro on the recent Grayson Highlands backpacking trip. I loved the photo results from that post, and I finally got around to playing with some of the video. So, without further ado: here's a video!

There's a reason why hikers get wide-eyed and eager when they hear "Grayson Highlands." There's a reason why those who have been before return time and again, and why those who haven't been are encouraged to go as soon as they can. Ponies! Balds! Easy hiking! PONIES!

Gatlinburg was crazy. Imagine Disney World covered in camo, $6 parking and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. But my stomach was empty and my camera batteries were dead and I just wanted a quick recharge at a fast food place where I wouldn’t bother anyone or be bothered, so I ventured down from a long sunset at Clingmans Dome in Great Smoky Mountains National Park through the dark twisting mountain path into the bright lights of the valley. A gas station and big sign proclaiming “GATLINBURG: Gateway to the Smoky Mountains” bedazzled me when I emerged from the forest and it took me several minutes to get my wits together.

If there were a good reason why bestselling hiking memoirs don’t turn into great movies, it should be that in novels the protagonist’s internal transformation and growth is readily portrayed through narrative, while films struggle to show these internal changes. It should be that the protagonist’s venture out of their comfort zone and into the unknown and then back again as a transformed character is limited in how it is portrayed, either as changes in their actions or via subtle visual changes – a slow thinning of the waistline, tanner skin, scars and bruises from the rough road, and the powerful resolve and acuity visible in a face after hours on the hard trail. These should be the challenges – portraying the narrative without incessant, droning voice-over.

Traffic was awful. I had no idea that Labor Day weekend sees some of the busiest traffic of the year, but I had already committed to driving to Atlanta on Friday evening, so I gritted my teeth and pushed through the frustratingly slow drive. First there were delays leaving Chapel Hill, and then there were slowdowns along I-85 south in Greensboro and Charlotte, and inexplicable stop-and-go traffic along random stretches through South Carolina.